AMD will not harm x86

AMDs moves to support other technology other than x86 does not mean that it no longer wants to move away from the technology which made it famous.

The strokers of beards and people in the know have been watching AMD's move to include other architectures besides x86 in future chipsets but are not stressed that it will affect x86's hold on the server processor market. According to ZDNet, the current manoeuvring from AMD will allow it to compete better with Intel.

AMD spokesperson Phil Hughes said that being "ambidextrous" means the designs of the instruction set architecture (ISA) of a chipset can be defined by the market. In otherwords it means that AMD can be a lot more flexible at the ISA level. Simon Stanley, of Earlswood Marketing, said that in the short term, AMD would be using chip architectures such as ARM and other third-party IP alongside x86 cores in server processors as a way of elbowing its way into the low-power and high-integration segments.

He said that AMDs plan to open up its chip designs to other architectures would not make a significant impact to the x86 architecture market share in the near future. But in the longer term, AMD might start selling ARM-based chips for servers.Stanley did not think that the idea of ARM-based servers will take a while to sell to conservative corporate customers.

However AMD might find some support from HP which is also looking at moving to ARM based servers.